You are viewing a free preview of this lesson.
Subscribe to unlock all 10 lessons in this course and every other course on LearningBro.
The fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989 and the reunification of Germany on 3 October 1990 were among the most dramatic and unexpected events of the twentieth century. A division that had seemed permanent — the frozen equilibrium of forty Cold War years — dissolved within a single year, achieved peacefully and by negotiation rather than by war or violent revolution. For a Paper 3 study organised around themes in breadth across 1871–1990, reunification is the resolution of the whole course: the "German question" that had run through every lesson since Bismarck's foundation of the Reich in 1871 was answered at last by the creation of a single, democratic, fully sovereign German state, embedded in the European Community and NATO and reconciled with its neighbours.
Yet reunification was also a beginning, and a contested one. The speed of the process, the terms on which the GDR was absorbed, and the economic and psychological dislocation that followed all shaped the new Germany and remain matters of historical debate. The events of 1989–90 must therefore be assessed both as a triumph of democratic aspiration and diplomatic skill and as a process whose costs and tensions — the collapse of eastern industry, mass unemployment, the enduring "wall in the heads" — were considerable and lasting. This lesson traces the collapse of the GDR in the autumn of 1989, the accidental fall of the Wall, the contested road to unity, the "Two-Plus-Four" diplomacy that settled the external dimension, the economics of currency union, and the accession of 3 October 1990. Throughout, the analytical task is to pursue the breadth themes to their culmination — the changing nature of government (democracy triumphs over dictatorship across the whole nation), national identity (the two rival identities are reunited, but unevenly), and the search for stability (the durable resolution, at last, of the German question) — and to weigh whether reunification was a triumph of democracy and diplomacy or a hasty absorption that stored up lasting problems.
By the end of this lesson you will be able to:
This lesson belongs to Edexcel 9HI0 Paper 3, Option 37.2: "Germany, 1871–1990: united, divided and reunited", a paper built on the dual structure of themes in breadth studied across the whole period and aspects in depth studied closely. Within our own teaching sequence it is the culminating narrative lesson, drawing the Eastern and Western tracks back together and bringing the 1871–1990 arc to its resolution; it also feeds the in-depth aspect concerning reunification.
Because Paper 3 rewards command of change over the long term as well as close analysis of the depth topics, keep asking how reunification resolves the "German question" first opened in 1871, and how it compares with the earlier settlements of 1919 and 1945. (For the precise assessment weightings and question wording, consult the official Edexcel specification and sample assessment materials rather than any paraphrase.)
The GDR's collapse was inseparable from the wider unravelling of the Soviet bloc, and no factor was more important than the change in Soviet policy under Mikhail Gorbachev.
The significance of the Soviet factor is difficult to overstate. The GDR had rested since 1953 on the ultimate backing of Soviet power; once Gorbachev made clear that this backing would not be used to suppress reform, the regime's foundation was pulled away. A strong analysis recognises that the withdrawal of the external prop is what made both the crisis and its peaceful resolution possible.
The GDR's crisis unfolded with extraordinary speed across the autumn of 1989.
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| May 1989 | Hungary begins dismantling its border fortifications with Austria |
| September 1989 | Thousands of GDR citizens flee via Hungary; others occupy West German embassies in Prague and Warsaw |
| 7 October 1989 | The GDR's 40th anniversary; Gorbachev is widely reported to have warned that those who come too late are punished by life |
| 9 October 1989 | The Leipzig Monday demonstration: around 70,000 march peacefully, and the security forces do not intervene — a decisive turning point |
| 18 October 1989 | Honecker is forced out and replaced by Egon Krenz |
| 4 November 1989 | The largest demonstration in GDR history fills East Berlin's Alexanderplatz |
| 9 November 1989 | The Berlin Wall falls after a confused press conference on new travel rules |
The Leipzig demonstrations and the regime's decision not to use force were pivotal. A violent crackdown remained entirely possible — the "Chinese solution" of Tiananmen Square that June was fresh in every mind — and its avoidance, sometimes called the "peaceful revolution" (friedliche Revolution), owed much to the courage of ordinary demonstrators, to divisions and paralysis within the ageing leadership, and, decisively, to the absence of Soviet backing for repression. Local factors mattered too: in Leipzig, the Protestant Nikolaikirche's peace prayers had provided a sheltered nucleus for protest, and on 9 October local officials, uncertain of orders and unwilling to fire on 70,000 of their own people, let the march proceed. For the breadth theme of the changing nature of government, this is the moment popular pressure from below begins to force the collapse of dictatorship — the mirror image of 1953, when the same population's rising had been crushed, the difference being the presence or absence of the Soviet guarantee.
The opening of the Wall on 9 November 1989 was, famously, in large part accidental — a fact of real analytical importance, because it shows how far events had slipped beyond the regime's control. At an evening press conference, the SED spokesman Günter Schabowski announced new, more liberal travel regulations and, when pressed by journalists on when they took effect, shuffled his papers and indicated that they applied "immediately, without delay". He had not been fully briefed, and the regulations had not been intended to take effect that night. The announcement was broadcast live; crowds surged to the Berlin checkpoints; and the overwhelmed border guards, without clear orders and unwilling to open fire on the throng, eventually raised the barriers. The televised scenes of East and West Berliners embracing atop the Wall were broadcast worldwide and became the defining images of the end of the Cold War. But the political question arose the moment the barriers lifted: what would follow the opening of the border? The Wall was breached, but the future shape of Germany was entirely undecided.
Reunification was neither inevitable nor universally desired in November 1989, and for several months a range of alternatives was seriously canvassed.
| Position | Advocates | Argument |
|---|---|---|
| Rapid reunification | Helmut Kohl (CDU); most West German politicians; increasingly, GDR citizens | A historic opportunity with economic and democratic benefits, to be seized before the moment passed |
| Confederation / slow process | Some in the SPD and among intellectuals | Rapid absorption would be economically and socially destabilising; better a gradual convergence |
| A reformed, independent GDR | GDR civic activists and intellectuals (New Forum; writers such as Christa Wolf and Stefan Heym) | A democratic "third way" between Western capitalism and Soviet communism |
| Caution or opposition abroad | Margaret Thatcher; initially François Mitterrand | Anxiety about the power and dominance of a large, united Germany at the centre of Europe |
The shift in the demonstrators' central chant captured the transformation of the popular mood, and it is one of the most economical pieces of evidence a breadth essay can deploy: from "Wir sind das Volk" ("We are the people" — a demand for democratic rights against the SED) in October to "Wir sind ein Volk" ("We are one people" — a demand for national unity) by the winter. The first free Volkskammer elections of 18 March 1990, won decisively by the eastern CDU-led "Alliance for Germany" (which campaigned for rapid unification and the swift introduction of the Deutsche Mark), provided the democratic mandate for rapid unity and effectively settled the argument in favour of Kohl's course. The civic activists who had made the revolution found themselves swiftly marginalised: the East German electorate wanted not a reformed GDR but the prosperity and freedom of the West, and as quickly as possible.
Chancellor Helmut Kohl seized the initiative on 28 November 1989 with a Ten-Point Programme for moving towards unity, which proposed a phased path from confederative structures to a full federation. Its manner was as significant as its content: it deliberately avoided fixing a timetable, and it was launched without prior consultation of the four occupying powers or even of Kohl's own coalition partner, Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher — a calculated assertion of German initiative that signalled Bonn's determination to lead the process rather than have it dictated. Events then moved faster than even Kohl's plan envisaged, driven by the continuing flight of easterners westward (which threatened to depopulate and destabilise the GDR) and by the eastern electorate's evident impatience. The phased confederation of the Ten Points was overtaken within months by the drive to immediate accession.
The external dimension of reunification — the aspect over which the four wartime Allies retained rights — was settled through the "Two-Plus-Four" negotiations between the two German states and the four powers (the USA, USSR, UK and France).
| Issue | Resolution |
|---|---|
| Borders | A united Germany recognised the Oder–Neisse line as Poland's permanent western frontier |
| Alliance and forces | United Germany would remain in NATO, with no foreign NATO forces stationed in the former GDR; the Bundeswehr would be capped at 370,000 |
| Soviet troops | Soviet forces would withdraw from eastern Germany by 1994 |
| Weapons | Germany reaffirmed its renunciation of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons |
| Sovereignty | All four-power occupation rights were terminated and full German sovereignty restored |
The diplomacy that produced this outcome was neither swift nor preordained, and it repays close analysis because it is where the political triumph of reunification was actually secured. The decisive obstacle was the Soviet refusal to accept a united Germany inside NATO: for Moscow, the GDR was the keystone of the Warsaw Pact and the western anchor of the entire post-war order, and its loss to the Western alliance touched the rawest of Soviet security nerves. The breakthrough came at the Kohl–Gorbachev meeting in the Caucasus in July 1990, where Gorbachev conceded that a united Germany would be free to choose its own alliance — in practice, NATO membership. Several factors made this concession possible. The formula of a Germany inside NATO but with no foreign forces or nuclear weapons stationed in the east offered Gorbachev a face-saving compromise. Substantial German financial assistance — pledges to fund the withdrawal and resettlement of some 380,000 Soviet troops, together with the wider dependence of a faltering Soviet economy on Western credit — gave Bonn real leverage. And consistent American backing mattered: President George H. W. Bush's administration steadily supported full German membership of NATO and worked to make it acceptable to Moscow. The "Two-Plus-Four" framework itself was a diplomatic innovation that managed German power without humiliating it, giving the two German states the leading voice while reassuring the four powers. The contrast with 1919 and 1945, when German borders and sovereignty were dictated to a defeated nation, is one a strong synoptic answer must draw out: in 1990, uniquely, the German settlement was achieved by negotiation among allies rather than imposed by victors.
Kohl pressed for an early economic, monetary and social union, converting the East German Mark to the Deutsche Mark on terms deliberately generous to easterners: savings up to a ceiling (4,000 Ostmark for most adults) at 1:1, larger savings at 2:1, and — crucially — wages, pensions and rents at 1:1. The Bundesbank warned that these rates were economically unjustifiable, since the Ostmark was worth far less at any realistic exchange. The decision was political: it protected easterners' living standards, discouraged them from migrating west, and bolstered Kohl ahead of the first all-German election.
The mechanism by which the 1:1 conversion destroyed eastern competitiveness deserves close analysis, because it is here that the political triumph and the economic disaster of unification are most tightly bound together. By converting wages and prices at parity, the currency union overnight raised the cost of eastern labour to roughly four times its realistic market value, while simultaneously opening eastern markets to vastly superior Western goods. Eastern firms thus lost both their cost advantage and their customers at a single stroke: enterprises that had survived only by trading within the protected Comecon bloc found, almost at once, that no one would buy their products — including their own former citizens, who flocked to Western brands. The consequence was the rapid collapse of the eastern industrial base and mass unemployment. For the breadth theme of the search for stability, this is the paradox at the heart of reunification: the very generosity that made unity politically popular in the east was what made it economically catastrophic there.
| Impact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Transfer payments | Well over a trillion Deutsche Marks were transferred from west to east in the following two decades |
| Deindustrialisation | The Treuhandanstalt privatised or wound up some 8,000+ state enterprises, often by closure |
| Unemployment | Rose steeply in the east (commonly cited at 15–20 per cent), far above western levels |
| Solidarity surcharge | A tax surcharge (initially 7.5 per cent) was levied from 1991 to help fund reconstruction |
| Infrastructure | Massive investment followed in roads, rail, telecommunications and housing |
The institution that carried out this transformation was the Treuhandanstalt, the trust agency charged with privatising the GDR's command economy. Inheriting some 8,500 state-owned enterprises employing around four million people, it was tasked with selling viable firms and winding up the rest; in practice, with eastern goods now unsellable, it became above all an engine of closure. Kohl's promise of "blooming landscapes" (blühende Landschaften) in the east became a byword for disillusionment as deindustrialisation hollowed out communities and prompted westward migration. Tony Judt, in Postwar, uses the German case as a cautionary illustration of the true cost of absorbing a bankrupt command economy, noting that the transfers required to lift the east towards western living standards far exceeded the optimistic projections of 1990 and weighed on the whole German economy for a generation. The gap between the rhetoric of effortless prosperity and the grinding reality of subsidised reconstruction did much to sour the eastern experience of unity — and lies behind the enduring "wall in the heads" discussed below.
Subscribe to continue reading
Get full access to this lesson and all 10 lessons in this course.